


Choice, Spinach and Other Concepts Not Found On Orion

by redfiona



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Asexual Character, F/M, Please see the notes for the warnings, this is not the prompt response you were looking for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-03-23
Packaged: 2018-03-19 07:49:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3602100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redfiona/pseuds/redfiona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, she suspects that the Universal Translator was trying to split them up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choice, Spinach and Other Concepts Not Found On Orion

**Author's Note:**

> I've gone with the TOS version of Orion society so Orion women are treated very badly within their society. This is only referenced obliquely and is entirely off-screen.

Gaila has heard all the rumours about Orion girls, and all the rumours about her. She doesn't mind, not too much, it was just that they were so inaccurate. She doesn't entirely understand it. She understands gossip, gossip is news through unofficial channels, so it being so wrong sort of defeats the whole purpose of gossip.

Nyota tried to explain that it was a sort of envy that lead to people starting those rumours. Because Gaila was pretty and cheerful and lots of boys (and some of the girls) seemed to like her, and that was all the excuse some people needed to start a rumour. That was another thing Gaila didn't understand, she was careful and never did anything with anyone who had a someone, unless that someone had said it was okay. There was nothing quite like an Orion education for learning how see how people were inter-related.

Anyway, she had her own boyfriend.

Not that anyone ever believed Pavel when he told them. Apparently there was "no way he could have bagged a babe like her". The babe in question had overheard that and used it as an excuse to go over to Pavel and land a kiss on him. Pavel didn't like public displays of affection as a rule, but didn't complain this time.

She loves him very much, even if she doesn't entirely understand him.

Asexuality as a concept hadn't made it as far as Orion. Obviously, there were some slave masters who had more women than they could possibly have intercourse with, but that didn't mean that they didn't have intercourse with some of them, and the women didn't get a choice in what they did.

That was the most amazing thing about freedom, the choices. Not just sex, but clothes and food and what you did with your life. Gaila tried to experience as much as she could when she first made it to Earth. She was amazed at the variety of choices available. She'd asked a replicator for a list of what food it could produce, and it had taken up so much of the memory on her pad. She'd tried bites of most of it, even if she could never quite like the taste of spinach.

Uhura found out and said that the replicators didn't always make things properly, and certainly not as well as her mother did for a whole range of dishes so Uhura organised a party where everyone brought something they'd home-cooked. That was where Gaila first met Pavel, even if, at the time, she only knew him as cadet who brought borscht. She knows humans like there to be a story about first meetings, but she really barely remembers him. She was too busy finding out how different kisses feel when you've been sucking strong mints.

She met him a few more times after that, casually in the large groups you find at parties. Then the Nero incident happened.

Gaila was one of eight people that survived from the Farragut. It wasn't the first time that she'd nearly died, it had happened when she escaped from Orion too. It doesn't get any easier. There were four of them who tried to escape Orion at the same time, assuming that they couldn't capture all of them. She was the only one that made it, as far as she knew. They all knew what the penalties were for trying to escape but the first choice most of them had ever had the chance to make was to take the risk. It turned out that one of the others that died had the same father as she did. Hearing what she had about what caused the Nero incident, Gaila can’t help but think that there is a universe out there where the other girl made it and she didn’t. She hopes her sister is happy in that universe. That was something else she's noticed a lot of Earth cultures don't have, a different word for sister from the same father as opposed to sister from the same mother. The translator suggests all kinds of things that aren't quite right, but then again, she supposes it's a detail you won't have if you don't need it. She should have been a bit more wary of the translator, knowing that it sometimes missed fine detail. But she wasn't.

Gaila and the other seven had been transferred to the Enterprise. She and Pavel started to hang out, and he became more than the cadet with the borscht.

One day he told her that he didn't want to have sex. Or at least, that's what she heard. She thought it was an odd thing to say in the situation they were in. It wasn't something she read as a sexual situation. But she'd accepted that humans were odd, so she just put it down to that.

The next time he said it, it was in a decidedly sexual situation. Only that time she heard it as 'he didn't want to have sex with her'. Justifiably, she thought, she just left. And she was righteously pissed off when Pavel came to find in Ten Forward, because she wished he would make his mind up.

He managed to convince her to take their argument somewhere private, because even when she was furious with him she didn't want to hurt him and she knew how private a person he was. They scrambled to find somewhere that was private and neutral territory. They ended up in the hydroponics bay, quiet in the dim light in case they disturbed the plants. Wu Da Chun from Botany would have murdered her for a start, since she was the one that gave Gaila the codes to get in.

It wasn't exactly where you'd choose to have a heart to heart.

Pavel started with a question, not with an apology. Which made no sense to her, and she told him so. She quickly got to the reason why she was pissed off with him.

"No, no, no. Not not sex with you, not sex with anyone," he said.

Which confused her. She made some assumptions about why he might feel that way, that he was ill, injured or incapable, all of which annoyed Pavel. In the end, to prevent a scene, even if the plants would have been the only witnesses, he handed her a data pad and told her to read it.

It had made more sense than what he had said, and she's not sure if that was because he wasn't being clear, or if she just wasn't listening right. But she was choosing to blame the translator.

The pad contained all the information Starfleet had on the sexual habits of the various Federation member species. For some there was tonnes of information, pages and pages, and for others there was barely anything. Gaila was convinced that if the Vulcans could have gotten away with writing "the sehlats bring our babies" they would have done. And for all of them, asexuality is perfectly normal, moreso with the Andorians where most of them are, and possibly it's just Orion that's odd. Which wouldn't surprise Gaila in the slightest.

A couple of days later she went to speak to Pavel in his quarters. She suspected he'd want to be somewhere more private if they were going to talk about this. She started simply. "This is all new to me." Pavel listened as she explained, and that's when she fell in love with him, because he was one of the few people who actually tried to understand, him and Uhura who is the sister Gaila never knew she had in so many ways.

Now when they talk, they stick to simple words, ones that shouldn't be misunderstood, because they've had enough misunderstandings already.

He tells her that he feels guilty sometimes, because he knows she likes sex. And she does, she likes it at lot, but, and she tries to explain it to him, that she’s happy with what they have, her hands and her toys and the way he watches sometimes, and that she loves how he listens and how he thinks, and that there is nothing in the world that she thinks is prettier than him in full blush, and she loves how he fits all of that together in one person, but it never seems to make sense when she says it so all she can say is that she'd rather be not having sex with him than having sex with anyone else, and hope that he understands that.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the lgbtfest prompt - "Any Fandom : any characters, a romantic asexual and a sexual try to negotiate a relationship that works for them both." Only I could never quite get it to be more about Chekov than Gaila so it ceased being suitable for that 'fest.


End file.
